Steven Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of InnovationReally intrigued by the title. Fabulously diverse in examples. If you ever felt like a square in round world, this book will make you sing for joy because that's what life is about--growing, moving, evolving.... The book is much stronger for being in Science section and not restricted to business innovation alone.

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Feb 29, 2012

delving into spring, or does a bamboo ask Is this too exuberant?

At least where I live, the white and mauve blossoms are peeping through the buds. Feathery fern unfurls on the mesquite trees around the sidewalks sharing the Mojave desert. Delicate orange globules grace the gritty branches of globemallow.

In Chinese philosophy, Bamboo hints at the sensation of the bounding energy of Spring.

Leaping. Springing. Generative, generous, circulating.

I jot: treat myself as kindly as a newly planted seed.

Does bamboo ask: Oh, this is too exuberant? I'm running away with juiciness and bursts of myself, greening and preening... Life isn't self-conscious, It simply blooms.

i imagine that yes is the only living thing. - e. e. cummings

I also jot what it feels for me, through me: a feathery tender type of power (blithe, light-hearted, skipping stones and ripples, barefoot meadow twirling, fireflies, laughter, soaring, whimsy, soaring, en-light-ness, cloud macaroons)... power nonetheless.

The Abbess and mystic Hildegard of Bingen called this vitality, this life-force, viriditas, or greenness: "In her works it has been translated in various ways, such as freshness, vitality, fertility, fecundity, fruitfulness, verdure, or growth. (Wikipedia)"

I happened to pick up a Food And Wine magazine at my convivial neighborhood coffee shop Sambalatte the other day for no particular reason. Flipped to the article on two chefs who got together for an entire weekend in one's home kitchen to improvise and delve and "explore the way inspiration turns raw ingredients into a finished dish." They prowled the fields of a farm in the Marin County hills, the stalls at the Ferry Plaza farmer's market, and unkempt urban park for wood sorrell and foraged berries for their raw materials. Then, they went off to play. (They called it cooking, but I knew better.)

The entire article reeked of Spring, even though its printed spine claimed January. Even if you are not a chef, it was a little gem of an article about the creative process, appreciating what's at hand and Nature as inspiration. Here are just two snippets from "An Intimate Look at the Creative Life of Chefs":

He [Rene Redzepi] opened his Copenhagen restaurant Noma at the age of 26 in 2003, a time when few people took Nordic cuisine seriously. Disavowing black pepper, olive oil and other non-local staples, Redzepi began looking more closely at what grew around him. His focus turned into a sort of radical naturalism that led him to discover, categorize and develop a cuisine around the edibles he found in the wilderness—new varieties of horseradish or seaweed, for instance, or a beach grass with a flavor identical to cilantro. One of the signature dishes at Noma is white asparagus cooked with pine branches plucked from trees that grow alongside the asparagus field; it’s landscape as recipe, and the results are improbably compelling.

And:

[Daniel] Patterson topped his egg with a sauce of fresh chèvre and water, adding a garnish of rosemary flowers he’d gathered from the roadside while walking his dog earlier that morning. Redzepi finished his with a sauce of aged goat cheese and nasturtium blossoms; he’d spotted the wildflowers in Patterson’s backyard while drinking coffee on the porch.

Yep:

The experience got the two chefs talking about how they develop dishes at their restaurants. “It’s weird,” said Redzepi. “Because you work toward some type of perfection, if it exists. And then when you reach something that you’re happy with—you can spend four years reaching that point—then it’s over. The whole thing is process.”

Patterson agreed: Once he gets a dish just right, its days on his menu are numbered.

Allow events to change you. You have to be willing to grow. Growth is different from something that happens to you. You produce it. You live it. The prerequisites for growth: the openness to experience events and the willingness to be changed by them.

Forget about good. Good is a known quantity. Good is what we all agree on. Growth is not necessarily good. Growth is an exploration of unlit recesses that may or may not yield to our research. As long as you stick to good you’ll never have real growth.

Process is more important than outcome. When the outcome drives the process we will only ever go to where we’ve already been. If process drives outcome we may not know where we’re going, but we will know we want to be there.

Love your experiments (as you would an ugly child). Joy is the engine of growth. Exploit the liberty in casting your work as beautiful experiments, iterations, attempts, trials, and errors. Take the long view and allow yourself the fun of failure every day.

Go deep. The deeper you go the more likely you will discover something of value.

Capture accidents. The wrong answer is the right answer in search of a different question. Collect wrong answers as part of the process. Ask different questions.

Study. A studio is a place of study. Use the necessity of production as an excuse to study. Everyone will benefit.

Begin anywhere. John Cage tells us that not knowing where to begin is a common form of paralysis. His advice: begin anywhere.

Everyone is a leader. Growth happens. Whenever it does, allow it to emerge. Learn to follow when it makes sense. Let anyone lead.

Harvest ideas. Edit applications. Ideas need a dynamic, fluid, generous environment to sustain life. Applications, on the other hand, benefit from critical rigor. Produce a high ratio of ideas to applications.

Keep moving. The market and its operations have a tendency to reinforce success. Resist it. Allow failure and migration to be part of your practice.

Slow down. Desynchronize from standard time frames and surprising opportunities may present themselves.

Don’t be cool. Cool is conservative fear dressed in black. Free yourself from limits of this sort.

Ask stupid questions. Growth is fueled by desire and innocence. Assess the answer, not the question. Imagine learning throughout your life at the rate of an infant.

Collaborate. The space between people working together is filled with conflict, friction, strife, exhilaration, delight, and vast creative potential.

____________________. Intentionally left blank. Allow space for the ideas you haven’t had yet, and for the ideas of others.

Stay up late. Strange things happen when you’ve gone too far, been up too long, worked too hard, and you’re separated from the rest of the world.

Work the metaphor. Every object has the capacity to stand for something other than what is apparent. Work on what it stands for.

Be careful to take risks. Time is genetic. Today is the child of yesterday and the parent of tomorrow. The work you produce today will create your future.

Repeat yourself. If you like it, do it again. If you don’t like it, do it again.

Make your own tools. Hybridize your tools in order to build unique things. Even simple tools that are your own can yield entirely new avenues of exploration. Remember, tools amplify our capacities, so even a small tool can make a big difference.

Stand on someone’s shoulders. You can travel farther carried on the accomplishments of those who came before you. And the view is so much better.

Avoid software. The problem with software is that everyone has it.

Don’t clean your desk. You might find something in the morning that you can’t see tonight.

Don’t enter awards competitions. Just don’t. It’s not good for you.

Read only left-hand pages. Marshall McLuhan did this. By decreasing the amount of information, we leave room for what he called our "noodle."

Make new words. Expand the lexicon. The new conditions demand a new way of thinking. The thinking demands new forms of expression. The expression generates new conditions.

Think with your mind. Forget technology. Creativity is not device-dependent.

Organization = Liberty. Real innovation in design, or any other field, happens in context. That context is usually some form of cooperatively managed enterprise. Frank Gehry, for instance, is only able to realize Bilbao because his studio can deliver it on budget. The myth of a split between "creatives" and "suits" is what Leonard Cohen calls a ‘charming artifact of the past.’

Don’t borrow money. Once again, Frank Gehry’s advice. By maintaining financial control, we maintain creative control. It’s not exactly rocket science, but it’s surprising how hard it is to maintain this discipline, and how many have failed.

Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world onto our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

Take field trips. The bandwidth of the world is greater than that of your TV set, or the Internet, or even a totally immersive, interactive, dynamically rendered, object-oriented, real-time, computer graphic–simulated environment.

Make mistakes faster. This isn’t my idea — I borrowed it. I think it belongs to Andy Grove.

Imitate. Don’t be shy about it. Try to get as close as you can. You’ll never get all the way, and the separation might be truly remarkable. We have only to look to Richard Hamilton and his version of Marcel Duchamp’s large glass to see how rich, discredited, and underused imitation is as a technique.

Scat. When you forget the words, do what Ella did: make up something else … but not words.

Break it, stretch it, bend it, crush it, crack it, fold it.

Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can’t find the leading edge because it’s trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

Coffee breaks, cab rides, green rooms. Real growth often happens outside of where we intend it to, in the interstitial spaces — what Dr. Seuss calls "the waiting place." Hans Ulrich Obrist once organized a science and art conference with all of the infrastructure of a conference — the parties, chats, lunches, airport arrivals — but with no actual conference. Apparently it was hugely successful and spawned many ongoing collaborations.

Avoid fields. Jump fences. Disciplinary boundaries and regulatory regimes are attempts to control the wilding of creative life. They are often understandable efforts to order what are manifold, complex, evolutionary processes. Our job is to jump the fences and cross the fields.

Laugh. People visiting the studio often comment on how much we laugh. Since I’ve become aware of this, I use it as a barometer of how comfortably we are expressing ourselves.

Remember. Growth is only possible as a product of history. Without memory, innovation is merely novelty. History gives growth a direction. But a memory is never perfect. Every memory is a degraded or composite image of a previous moment or event. That’s what makes us aware of its quality as a past and not a present. It means that every memory is new, a partial construct different from its source, and, as such, a potential for growth itself.

Power to the people. Play can only happen when people feel they have control over their lives. We can’t be free agents if we’re not free.

Bonus: Join me (hey, takes at least two to tango) on this exploration of viriditas. For those that want to delve more, I'm writing an email newsletter this spring that goes into more depth. It's also an experiment in generosity and circulation, so no strings attached. Sign up here.

Big Bambú: You Can’t, You Don’t, and You Won’t Stop by Mike and Doug Starn "was constructed throughout the spring, summer and fall by the artists and their team of rock climbers. Set against Central Park and its urban backdrop, Big Bambú suggested the complexity and energy of an ever-changing living organism.

Big Bambú encompassed a vast network of 7,000 interconnected 30- and 40-foot-long fresh-cut bamboo poles, lashed together with 70 miles of nylon rope. An internal footpath artery system grew along with the structure, facilitating its progress. The artists and museum made the artery systems open to the public, allowing visitors to fully experience the living sculpture and thrill of being aloft within this artwork (100 feet above Central Park)." - 20X200 (their description, and they also offer photographic prints by the brothers of their Big Bambu installation)

Comments

Hi Evelyn
I have been reading your blog for a while and I just wanted to let you know how much I have been enjoying it and especially this post about creative process. I am an artist and have been thinking a lot about creative process and was just about to post something on my blog. I haven't posted it yet, but here is my blog http://michelebeckart.blogspot.com/

In any case, I have really enjoyed your writing and the sharing of your thoughts. I look forward to reading more
Best wishes
Michele